We first met Dr. Lockwood in the beginning of this chapter. As I mentioned then, she’s one of those characters that ended up with a short stick for the webcomic reboot. In the old version, General Nelson displayed a greater interest in getting to know her new crew, and she and Dr. Lockwood were well on their way to bonding. The page below (click to embiggen) comes from issue #3 of the old series, circa 1997. Yes, Dr. Lockwood has changed a little, and yes, that is an enormous chess piece next to Scavina. It made sense at the time.

Discussion (10) ¬

I much prefer this Dr Lockwood! Great expressions on her – from the medical and scientific skeptic to the scientific curious – and science needs both in equal measures to find out anything real. Glad she’s still around this time!

I doubt it. Dr. Lockwood’s diagnosis suggests to me that Aria, Patty, and Zan are in no shape to be wandering around. I’d expect all three of them are in the Galaxion’s medical bay, and with no real intention to leave it.

Ha– I don’t know what this says about where my brain is at, but my first interpretation of your comment, Prestwick, was that you were talking about the three kids the Doctor and the General are talking about in that old page I linked to in the commentary. (General Nelson’s daughter to whom she refers is, of course, Hilena, whom we met back in Chapter Four.) There are some non-canonical but historical reasons why I would think this, because in a much, much earlier version of Galaxion, there were kids running around the ship and their hijinks featured heavily into the stories we wrote.

Anyway.

We’ll learn more about where Aria and Zan and Patty are when this little debriefing is over.

Thanks for imbedding the first version Tara. It’s been many years since I’ve seen it.

Maybe it’s just me but Scavina seems much younger in the earlier version; I think I detect a big Star Blazers influence in the original character faces. We noticed how Dr. Lockwood mutated from a Caucasian blonde into a cornrowed woman of African descent. I think that’s a more interesting approach. Given the large number of colonies in your universe, one would presume that they would represent races and cultures descended from multiple Terran ethnicities and countries.

I was in Indonesia when local television first started broadcasting Star Trek The Next Generation. The editors cut into the original episodes and replaced the edited material with locally filmed footage featuring an Indonesian Star Fleet starship crew interacting with the original episode. The production values weren’t great and I don’t speak Indonesian but they certainly believed that Indonesian culture has a big stake in future history. It really made me think about the global interest in investment in our world’s interstellar future.

That’s certainly an interesting idea, but is it a good one? I’m German, and in Germany foreign movies generally get dubbed, and the dubbing studios are usually quite good, so there isn’t a jarring lack of lipsync. However, there are also movies in which the movie’s villain in the translation was Argentinian or Hungarian or whatever – even though from careful viewing it would be clear the villain was German in the original. I found the translators’ lie worse than the villain originally being German (mind you, that’s all post-war, some of it decades after). In the southern US, TV series used to be edited before viewers got to see them – any competent black character was promptly edited out.

But maybe I’m just worrying too much here, and part of the original’s values made it into the “translation”. I can’t say it since I haven’t seen it…